What the scanner actually does
Roughly every five minutes, the scanner replays the last eight hours of real best-bid/best-ask history for every coin on every pair of supported exchanges and backtests the same dual-threshold strategy your trading cards run: open when the spread exceeds a threshold, close when it reverts. Each row in the table is the result of that simulation — estimated profit, number of cycles, and the thresholds that produced them, with trading fees already subtracted.
Two things keep expectations honest. First, the freshness stamp: the table shows when the last scan ran and warns when results are older than 15 minutes. Second, a backtest is a measurement of the recent past, not a promise — it uses top-of-book prices, so your execution at real size will differ. The scanner narrows thousands of pairs down to a shortlist; the verification is yours.
Four tabs, four strategies
Arbitrage — the classic: two-leg spread arbitrage on linear (USDT-margined) perpetuals. The default view and the strategy described in Spreads & Signals.
Inverse — the same spread logic on coin-margined BASE-USD perpetuals, limited to the exchanges that list them. A separate market with its own dislocations; see Inverse Futures.
Funding — ranks cross-exchange funding-rate differentials for hold-style positions: short the leg that receives funding, long the leg that pays less. Covered in depth in Funding Rate Arbitrage.
Cash & Carry — spot long plus perp short on the same venue, collecting funding with zero price exposure. See Cash & Carry.
Reading the columns
Profit and Cycles are scoped to the selected time window (30m to 8h): estimated net profit and how many open-close cycles the backtest completed in that window. Avg/cycle divides one by the other — many shallow cycles and few deep ones can show the same total. Thresholds shows the open → close spread pair the backtest used; Quick Start copies these onto the card.
Trend is acceleration: how the most recent hour compares to the 8-hour average. Values at 2.0 and above mark a pair that is heating up; below 0.5 means it is cooling off and the backtested profit may already be history.
Confidence (0–100) scores how stable and repeatable the backtested cycles were. High confidence means consistent oscillation; low confidence often hides one lucky spike in an otherwise flat spread. Treat anything below 50 as a yellow flag, whatever the profit column says — see Signal Strength for the methodology.
Volume A/B show each leg's 24h turnover — thin venues move first and fill worst. Fees is the round-trip cost per cycle for your fee tiers. The ⚡ marker flags pairs where the simulation closed a cycle within the last 30 minutes: alive right now, not just within the window.
Filters and time windows
The window selector (30m / 1h / 2h / 4h / 8h) rescopes the profit and cycle columns, the sorting and the filters in one click. Short windows surface what is hot right now; the 8h window favors steady all-day oscillators. Comparing a pair across windows is itself a signal: profitable everywhere = robust; profitable only at 30m = chasing a spike.
The filter panel narrows the universe: restrict to specific exchanges (or anchor on one), require minimum 24h volume, minimum confidence, minimum profit and cycle counts per window (all conditions combine with AND), hide big caps, search for a specific coin, or show only ⚡-active pairs.
A practical starter recipe: your exchanges only, volume above $1M, confidence above 60, at least 2 cycles in the 1h window, sorted by 1h profit. It is conservative enough to filter noise and short enough to be actionable.
Check before you trade
Every row opens a spread chart: the real two-sided spread with the backtest's thresholds drawn in and simulated entries marked. Thirty seconds here answers the question that matters — does this spread oscillate around a level (tradeable), or did it jump once and flatline (not)? Understanding the Spread Chart decodes every element.
Funding rows drill into a dedicated view: per-leg funding history, the cumulative differential over 7/30/180 days, an annualized estimate, and an income calculator that scales everything to your intended position size — with a countdown to the next settlement on each leg.
Finally, depth: the scanner measures top-of-book spreads, but your order walks the book. Verify there is enough resting liquidity at your size — the Depth Multiplier article explains how cards enforce this automatically at execution time.
Acting on a row
Quick Start creates a trading card straight from the row — symbol, exchanges and thresholds copied from the backtest, your defaults filling the rest. Pro users choose between classic two-leg and one-leg variants. The card never starts trading by itself; see Quick Start: Your First Trade for the full launch sequence.
Not ready to commit? Star the pair to keep it on your favorites list, or share the spread chart by link or straight to Telegram.
One habit beats all filters: never trade the top row just because it is the top row. The best candidates score well on profit and confidence and volume, and survive a look at the spread chart. Ten extra seconds of skepticism is the cheapest risk management you will ever buy.